The Ex Expat

11 April 2012

One of the culinary delights I was looking forward to during our Scottish holiday was eating as much lamb as possible. With two lamb roasts in the space of a week, I’ve been doing quite well on that account. A lamb roast may seem like something fancy you reserve for Sundays, but with this easy peasy glaze it can be turned in to a quick midweek meal.

Ingredients

• About 500g lamb (not including the weight of any bones). We had a shoulder, but a leg of lamb also works well.
• 4-5 cloves of garlic
• A couple of sprigs of rosemary
• 2 tablespoons apricot jam
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Directions

• Preheat your oven to 180 C.
• Place your piece of lamb on to a baking tray lined with aluminium foil.
• With a sharp knife, stab your lamb all over, about 1cm deep.
• Peel the garlic cloves and cut them into strips about 1/2cm wide. Insert a garlic strip into each of the cuts.
• Mix together the apricot jam and mustard, and smear it all over the lamb.
• Pluck the leaves off the rosemary sprigs and sprinkle them over the lamb. They’ll stick to the glaze.
• Roast the lamb for 1 hour. If the glaze is starting to burn, cover the lamb in aluminium foil. Depending on your oven, you may need to roast it for a bit longer (extend roasting time 15 mins at a time, checking in between). The juices should run clear and the meat no longer be pink.
• We had our lamb with sweet potato mash, green beans and roast cherry tomatoes. Simply add the tomatoes to the roasting tray for the last 15 mins and drizzle them with some olive oil.

10 April 2012

This morning we awoke to lashings of sleet battering our window. Definitely not ‘nice enough’ for the swing park today. But we’d also been planning to test out the newly refurbished and re-opened Commonwealth Pool, which seemed perfect for a day like this. First though, a quick trip to the doctor to get the boy’s cough checked out, which he’s had on and off all through winter but had been getting progressively worse over the past week. The trip resulted in antibiotics for the boy to ward off the onset of a lung infection, and swimming is off the agenda. Strict doctor’s orders. We were quickly running out of options for entertaining a toddler who, despite his rattling cough, is full of beans. Leave it to the National Museum of Scotland to save the day. The boy greeted the Imagine gallery like a long lost friend, running from one activity to the next waving his hands about in sheer excitement. And since our last visit he’s become a lot more mobile and more inquisitive, so there were lots of new things to investigate too. We also checked out Adventure Planet, another hands-on gallery where you can do such fun things as crawl through a hollow tree or dig up a dinosaur skeleton, where we bumped into our old neighbours with their kids - seems like the museum really was the place to be today.

9 April 2012

Ever since he learned to sit up, the boy has loved going on swings. First the neighbour’s swing in the back garden, then I started taking him to the swing park whenever the weather was nice enough (in Edinburgh, nice enough = not raining^^). But he hasn’t been on a swing once since we moved to Berlin. Why? Because despite having a playground on every other block, or so it seems, there are no baby swings. Anywhere. You know, the ones with the basket so the babies and toddlers can’t fall off (as demonstrated by the boy in the photo). They just don’t exist. We asked at his nursery whether they knew of a playground that had any, and they had no idea what we were talking about. So visiting the swing park was high on our list for our Edinburgh visit. We’d already had to rule out the beach trip in the Highlands after arriving in a blizzard, but at least it was ‘nice enough’ in Edinburgh today for the long awaited swing park trip!

8 April 2012

Yesterday we walked past the church here in Edinburgh where we got married, only to find this lovely seasonal message outside. So with that I’d like to wish you all a very Happy Easter!

7 April 2012

My packing list for this holiday looked something like this: Passports? Check. Tickets? Check. Easter egg dyes? Check. Although he’ll be more aware than he was last year, the boy probably still doesn’t understand the concept of Easter. And he doesn’t even like hard boiled eggs. Nevertheless, I just had to dye some Easter eggs, it’s all part of the fun of it. The weather forecast is not looking to good, but I’m still hoping to hide them in the garden for a little Easter egg hunt.